myMail Review

Can there really be one iOS email app to rule them all? Moscow-based Mail.ru thinks so, and is bringing its experience serving more than 100 million users in Russian-speaking countries to a new mobile email client for the rest of the world. myMail consolidates multiple email accounts into a free, universal app, and the service uses proprietary algorithms to detect settings for virtually any IMAP or POP email service, including Gmail, Yahoo!, AOL, and Outlook. All that’s required is the address and password.

To test this, we added three notoriously finicky accounts from this reviewer’s own self-hosted domain. We’ve never been able to set up such accounts without having to fiddle with IMAP hostname and port settings, but to our surprise, myMail added them with no such problems. We had less luck with Microsoft Outlook and Hotmail accounts – our initial efforts were thwarted by an “Authentication Error: No server connection” prompt without the account actually being added, although myMail pushed a customary welcome email to our inbox anyway. After a few more attempts, however, both accounts were successfully added.

Once set up, email accounts appear as circular avatars, which for some accounts can be profile photos (Gmail, Outlook), a generic icon (iCloud), or just the first letter of the account name; swiping to the right reveals the full account address. myMail feels right at home on iOS 7, pulling photos from your address book along with social networking service icons to make the experience more visual.

MyMail features a multi-panel, gesture-based UI for quickly jumping between account folders and messages, which are encrypted even while on public Wi-Fi connections. Although the app offers push notifications for accounts that don’t provide them natively, we found over time that they would stop working entirely, even after deleting and reinstalling. Such lingering bugs mar an experience with otherwise extensive push-based scheduling, filter, and privacy controls that competing apps can only dream of.

The bottom line. There’s a lot to like about myMail’s slick UI and the ability to add nearly any email account, but automatic setup and push notifications feel like a work in progress.

Comment

As can be read at reddit.com your mail is routed over third-party (Russian) servers. In addition we registered access to our IMAP servers from the same third-party IP addresses even when we where not online, not using myMail. The servers are connected to mail.ru; this is also where your e-mail and login data are stored.

Some users report that this happens even after you uninstalled the software.

It worries us that the login data and all e-mails are stored at third-party servers. myMail's helpdesk has quick response, which is good, and acknowledges this. They state they are very open about this. We think we should have been informed before, e.g. during installation, and - if we agree - only then the software should gain access to your data.

Bottom line: you are not accessing the e-mail on your mail server, but you are accessing a copy of your e-mail that is stored on a mail.ru server by using your login data.